I didn't feel like necroing that post. Besides, I want to talk about Competitive Tetris. I bought Puyo Tetris a few weeks ago for the PS4 (I don't have a PS4 yet) and I'll say the game was 100% worth it. Not only am I playing the modern version of "Mean Bean Machine", but competitive Tetris seems to be a game that literally everyone I know feels comfortable to play. Its an excellent party game with super-deep competitive aspects.

From the Puyo side, I've stagnated.

Spoiler:

I think I've regained the speed of my youth (back when I played Mean Bean Machine on a Sega Genesis), but without any competition, there's basically no point in continuing . I can comfortably reach 5-combos faster than my opponents can setup anything (and since literally everyone else plays Tetris... that means I hit them for ~15+ garbage lines within ~20 seconds or so). If I get "lucky" with my transition and can build a 7-combo, the instant-kill is glorious from my perspective... but no one seems to want to play Tetris vs Puyo against me.

I have literally never transitioned to a "3rd level" combo (10+ combo). I can't "tail" combos. I only know the GTR transition + Stack transition (literally nothing else). And the vast majority of my strategy is just "head-extending combo". So I know I'm a weaker Puyo player in the great scheme of things... but its all about what your friends play around you... ya know what I mean?

FYI: seasoned players consider Tetris to have the advantage in this game (Note: EDIT: A balance patch in the last few years has changed this significantly, but Tetris is still considered to have a slight advantage), but no one in my group is at the skill level where Puyo loses to Tetris. Soooo... Puyo is "unfair" in my group and I'm basically forced to play Tetris vs Tetris. No one else knows how to play Puyo, so I instant-win in "Swap" mode or any of the combination modes as well.

Knowing how to play decent Puyo is a huge advantage in those "mixed" modes, who'd have thought?

Spoiler:

Also, at low levels of play, I'd argue its much easier to do a 5-combo in Puyo (aka: the max you can do without a transition) than to downstack the ~15 garbage that is sent, or to build the 3+ Back-to-Back Tetris / TSpin doubles needed to negate the 5-combo damage.

At higher levels of play, it looks like Pros are MUCH faster at downstacking and are able to whip out advanced setups like the Imperial Cross for a B2B Ren1 T-Spin Double (that's 9 garbage yo! Plus starting a Ren chain and a B2B chain for more future damage! Tetris has MUCH more HP than Puyo (you instant-kill Puyo players with 5-combo. But all damage is divided by ~4 when it transfers from Puyo -> Tetris. So it barely registers as ~half the board), Tetris has instant-drops (Puyo can only soft-drop), and Puyo gets garbage from the top (which kills combos, slows down the player and stuff...)

So... Puyo > Tetris for beginners, but Tetris > Puyo for experts. At least, based on the rules of this particular game and how damage is dealt to each other. Play Swap mode for balance!

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Sticking to the Tetris vs Tetris rules still results in a great game. I'd have to say that I'm still beginner level Tetris, based on my research. But I can comfortably setup T-Spin doubles over a Tetris-column, and am comfortable in executing a 3-wide combo. On NullPoMino I'm at approximately 18-lines per minute (yeah... I know. Pros get 18-tetris per minute...).

So I'm kinda slow at it, but I am comfortable at doing it. I'm hoping speed will come with practice.

I guess my first step would be to buy a PS4 so that I can actually play this game at my house, lol. Instead of playing it at only my friend's houses. But after that, I think I'll move on to practicing ideal movement finesse in the "Lucky Attack" mode.

After much delay, I finally decided to buy Puyo Tetris again since it actually came out in English. I'm impressed at all of the work Sega put into the Voice Actors / Actresses and making the game really shine. The story is of course absolutely silly, but it has its moments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z53ImZFol-4

And now that I can read the menus, I can set handicaps in battle, and go through the menus and everything. So I guess it was worth it overall.

Theses tutorials go into the "thinking" of advanced players, giving you the knowledge to start your Puyo and/or Tetris studies. There's a lot of good stuff online, but like all research... knowing the keywords of the subject matter helps a lot.

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EDIT: I should note that Tetris has been nerfed "recently", which is probably before the English release of this game came out. In Puyo vs Tetris, TSpin Double does 3 dmg, and TSpin Triple does 4 damage (compared to the original 4 and 6 damage respectively). Tetris (4-lines cleared at once) still does 4 damage as it always has done. Back-to-Back for +1 damage as usual.

Tetris Combos don't start up till Combo 5, meaning Tetris will literally never be able to do as much damage as Puyo. Still, Tetris is considered to be the advantage due to having instant-drops and overall faster gameplay. But its a much closer game now, I can have good games with Tetris or Puyo online.

Swap mode seems to still work with original rules, so 4-wide Combo Tetris setups are extremely powerful (+5 damage at Combo 10).

Jorpho wrote:Have there been any variants lately that incorporated the "square mode" introduced in 1999's The New Tetris? I thought that was a neat feature. Last I heard it was included in Lockjaw.

Certainly not "Puyo Tetris", which is just B2B, Combos, TSpins, TSpin Mini, Tetris, Triple, and Double on the Tetris side.

Apparently "The New Tetris (1999)" is the last official Tetris with the square mode feature. Lockjaw is a fan-made recreation. I personally use "Nullpomino" (also fan-made) as my computer tetris program of choice. I don't recall any "square" mode option but there's a LOT of menus and options... maybe its worth checking out?

If Lockjaw is sufficient for you though, I guess it just comes down to Lockjaw.

Jorpho wrote:Wikipedia also references Tetris Worlds, but that was from 2001.

I haven't thought about Lockjaw in some time. Apparently it was forced to cease development some time ago. Perhaps NullpoMino will meet a similar fate. TVTropes says Square mode is in there too.

Hmm... well if it makes you feel any better, the creation of perfect-squares like that is a necessary skill for "Perfect Clears" (which is a scoring methodology that I forgot about in my previous post).

Perfect clears deal 10-lines of damage (9 in Puyo vs Tetris mode in the current patch), making them the highest-damage attack in the game. So if you can figure out how to make a perfect-clear, you should go for it. In contrast, a TSpin Triple is 6 (7 with B2B bonus), while a Tetris is 4 (5 with B2B bonus). Perfect clears stack with Ren but not with the line-clear. (So if you clear a Tetris for a perfect clear, you deal 10-damage, not 14. But if you finish a Ren / Combo 10 with a perfect clear, you get +5 bonus damage or 15 damage sent to the opponent on that last hit)